Thread by @Monaheart1229

Happy Forth of July, everyone. This is a very important article.
For Hope in Trump’s America, I Read Sojourner Truth nyti.ms/2KPUtIN

2/"I have been feeling so much despair that, even as a media scholar, I’m often tempted to avoid the news.The unending stream of political developments that I know will deepen the suffering of my fellow Americans and others around the world is heartbreaking: migrant children

3/"separated from their parents, mass shootings that don’t inspire gun control, the crisis in Yemen, threats to women’s rights, and so much more. It might be surprising to hear that what’s been keeping me going lately is meditating on slavery. I’ve been reading Sojourner Truth’s

4/"famous 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.” Truth reportedly said: “I could work as much … as a man … and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne 13 children and seen most of them sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus

5/"heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”..When Truth asked the group of mostly white women in her audience whether she was a woman, she was not simply pointing to the hypocrisy of Western thought in which nations and “civilized” societies were built on the enslavement, murder and

6/"exploitation of women and children. Truth’s question was a provocation, a challenge to a racial structure built on the dehumanization of an entire group of human beings. It was a philosophical gauntlet. Like Black Lives Matter, it was a call to bring clarity to American

7/"oppression. Today, it’s also a reminder to me that black people have lived through the very worst of what this country has inflicted. That we have survived..The barbarity of American slavery should be recalled more often, if only to truly understand the significance of its

8/"demise. It was the grief of losing one’s child, being raped, beaten, tortured and separated from your own language, family and friends at a whim. It was a system that normalized and codified its everyday brutality. It was life in constant fear and punishing, exacting labor.

9/"And it was completely legal. For someone like Truth, to see it come to an end must have felt like a miracle. Freedom. The woman who escaped slavery in New York with her baby daughter just so that at least one couldn’t be stolen away. Who successfully sued a white man to get

10/"back her son. Who felt called by God to go “testifying the hope was in her.”..A hard-fought, long-fought miracle. The historian Nell Irvin Painter cautions that Truth has become more symbol than reality in public imagination. For example, Truth, in fact, had only five

11/"children, not 13 — an embellishment attributed to those who later transcribed the speech for the illiterate former slave. My own meditation on her mostly substantiates Ms. Painter’s claim — I find myself looking at images of Truth, drawing strength from my imaginings of her

12/"surrounded by white women, boldly challenging their hypocrisy and racism. Many nights as I put my son to sleep in my arms, I think of her standing in a courtroom to claim her child and I remind myself that this is what freedom means..It took a war, radicals, lawbreakers,

13/"advocates who risked their lives and careers, a shift in power, economic opportunity, profoundly oppressive conditions —— but things changed..Six years ago I participated in the Occupy movement, during which a crossracial coalition of people from New York to Honolulu

14/"protested income inequality, gentrification, police brutality and unjust incarceration. The movement had many successes, but in its immediate aftermath we saw widespread crackdowns in cities around the country on people’s ability to interact and exist in urban outdoor spaces

15/" policies that have aided efforts to criminalize the nation’s homeless and pre-emptively arrest other vulnerable populations. Similarly, I think it’s useful to think of President Trump’s election and the policies of his administration as a backlash to progress. In order to

16/"have hope, I have to believe that, after the backlash, things — for black Americans and other oppressed people here and around the world — will change again..In part, searching for hope by reflecting on slavery requires meditating on how little progress we’ve made toward

17/"liberation, too. As Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton University notes in her writing on contemporary black activism, exactly 150 years passed between the day in 1865 when the Civil War came to an end and the day in 2015 when Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man

18/"was killed by Baltimore police officers. A Department of Justice investigation later found that the department routinely violated the civil rights of residents of the predominantly black city. “Freedom in the United States,” Prof. Taylor notes, “has been elusive contingent,

19/"and fraught with contradictions and unattainable promises — for all almost everyone.” She’s right. And yet, we push toward freedom..For black Americans, the struggle of emancipation is riddled with its failures: sharecropping, lynching, segregation, disenfranchisement and

20/"brutal, unfair treatment by the criminal justice system. This suffering demands rage and anguish, but it also provides the fuel to push forward. It serves as a reminder of what is at stake if we stop. As the civil rights hero Representative John Lewis said in a recent tweet,

21/"“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime.”..For many of us, justice and equality remain elusive. And, yet, we have hope. If we are to be the people

22/"we aim to be, it is really our only option. There is a quote borrowed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., attributed to a 19th-century minister, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

23/"I’m not sure if that’s true or not. But if it is, we will be the ones to bend it."
~Khadijah Costley White is an ass't professor of communications & media studies at Rutgers Univ & the author of “Branding Right-Wing Activism: The News Media and the Tea Party.” NYT, 7/4/18